About

Raúl Ortega Ayala is a visual atist who addresses social issues through a practice rooted in diverse contexts. Through extensive research processes, he engages with communities and develops responses to specific territories, themes or issues. His life and practice are migratory in nature, shaped by a pervasive condition of off-centeredness—not only through the different social and geographical environments in which he has lived or chosen to engage with, but also through the constant exploration of multiple subjects and artistic media, which continuously place him in the position of a foreigner and a learner.

Recently, he has focused on a series of projects that investigate what societies remember, forget, or repress about their past, brought together under the unifying title From the Pit of EtCetera. Among them is The Zone (2013–2020), which focuses on the exclusion zone of Chernobyl in Ukraine. This project includes a film—which follows four former residents as they walk through their abandoned town and recount their stories—as well as an extensive body of photographic field notes derived from seven years of fieldwork.

Another project, Montserrat (a phono-archaeology) (2017–2023), explores—through film, photographic field notes, microscopic photography, and collaborations with DJs—the lost sounds of Montserrat, a Caribbean island devastated by volcanic eruptions that began in 1995. The film travels through the remains of the island, the former local radio station, and the legendary AIR Studios Montserrat, founded by Sir George Martin on Montserrat. For the soundtrack, Ortega Ayala conducted acoustic experiments in these spaces and recovered voices and music from tapes and vinyl records found beneath the ash. He also traced local sounds in more than seventy pop albums recorded there in the 1980s, sounds that still linger in the melodies we hum, sing, and dance to.

The series also includes X-Ray Paintings, a body of paintings that reveals works hidden beneath others using radiographic imaging techniques. This series interrogates notions of authorship and originality, opening a dialogue between what is hidden in the underlying layers and what remains visible on the surface—between what was presumed forgotten and what endures.

In earlier series, he turned to anthropological methods such as participant observation, fieldwork, and embodiement of knowledge. Among these is Food for Thought, a body of work derived from a deliberate immersion into the world of food, which included cooking and butchery courses in London, Mexico, and New York City, as well as various jobs in the food service industry. Among the works is Tomatina–Tim, a two-channel video juxtaposing the Spanish festival La Tomatina with an American competitive eater consuming forty hot dogs in ten minutes. Another piece, Melting Pots (A fiction based on facts), examines the paradoxical “afterlife” of some metallic remains from the September 11 attacks, which were reused by manufacturers in India to produce kitchen utensils. And Cheese Rolling, a continuously looping video of slow-motion footage shot at the famous annual event in Gloucester, United Kingdom, that reflects on the endless cycle of pursuit and consumption that, like La Tomatina, has transformed from local tradition into a tourist event.

In the series An Ethnography of Gardening, the artist immersed himself in this field by working full-time as a gardener in London for two years. This research gave rise to a body of work incorporating grafting techniques, botanical illustration, scents, and process-based practices.